Fight Big-Tech Censorship with Low-Tech Retail Politics

Thoughts that are increasingly unthinkable online may yet find success via handbilling, door-knocking, and person-to-person conversations.

January 6 represented a turning point, not just for the U.S., but for the broader Western world. The riot on Capitol Hill was preceded by weeks of political fantasies, dreams of some decisive action that would knock the U.S. political system out of a morass that Donald Trump neither created nor proved capable of shifting. But like a wish on the monkey’s paw, what followed after the riots revealed a cruel but altogether fitting irony. Someone had clearly prepared to cross the Rubicon in the period leading up to that event; it just wasn’t a much-diminished Donald Trump.

Already, the merger of “woke” big business, professional-class “knowledge workers,” and political operators within the Democratic Party had occurred brazenly, a declaration of war in plain view of their putative opponents. In war, how one defends reveals priority, while how and where one chooses to attack indicates intent. In that vein, one can already say a lot about what the new powers that be have in store over the coming months and years. A new kind of far-reaching censorship is already being put into effect, amidst calls to start a “war on terror” against domestic political opponents, enemies lurking among the American people themselves.

The carping of free-market libertarians now sounds empty indeed, given that “just shut up and start your own social media platform” is no longer a serious suggestion even in theory. In fact, the fate of Parler is instructive. The platform was not only denied server hosting by Amazon, but completely iced out by polite society, unable to find anyone willing to provide them any sort of service, not even legal counsel. Elsewhere, calls ring out for Gab to suffer the same fate, and corporations line up to censure various “enemies of democracy,” including senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley—whose aptly named upcoming book The Tyranny of Big Tech was recently dropped by publisher Simon & Schuster after he objected to the certification of electoral college votes. Only the hopelessly credulous would look at this as some sort of temporary state of affairs before a return to political normalcy. Rather, this is the new normal, as what is happening right now amounts to a rising political and economic coalition flexing its muscles during grueling behind-the-scenes workouts. Those muscles will only become stronger and more hypertrophied in the years ahead, and as their functional ability increases, they will be used again and again.

Leave a Comment